Community Data Science Course (Spring 2016)/Day 2 Coding Challenges

Each of the challenges this week will ask you to modify and work with code in the Wordplay project which you should have installed and begun working with in class.

As always, it's not essential that you solve or get through all of these — I'm not grading your answers on these. That said, being able to work through at least many of them is a good sign that you have mastered the concepts for the week. It is always fine to collaborate or work together on these problem sets. The only thing I ask is that you do not broadcast answers before Sunday at midnight on Canvas.

Challenges

Challenges about finding words:

Find all words that start with 'a' and are 9 or more letters long.
What is the longest word that starts with a 'q'?
Find all words that end with 'nge'
You need a word that matches "a*ey" (here "*" means any letter). Are there any words that match?
Print every other word that matches the condition in (1) above.
Find the longest string where no character is used > 1 time.

Now we're going to start finding points! You can use scrabble.scores to get the scores for every letter. But we're going to cheat: assume you have all the letters.

What is the most valuable word in the dictionary, and how much is it worth?
You want to match a word that starts with an 'a', has an 'e' in the 4th slot, and is no more than 7 characters long. What is the best word you can play?
Make a list that shows the most valuable word that starts with each letter. Example:

a: apophthegmatize, 37
c: chiquichiquis, 41
b: bezzazzes, 47
e: embezzlements, 37
d: decitizenizing, 36
.....